Harvey Korman Finally Turns the Tables on Tim Conway in a Rare ‘Carol Burnett Show’ Revenge Moment
For years, one of the purest pleasures of The Carol Burnett Show was watching Tim Conway reduce Harvey Korman to helpless laughter. Conway’s genius was not just that he was funny. It was that he seemed to know exactly how long to stretch a pause, how far to push a face, and how subtly to derail a scene before Korman collapsed. But in one especially memorable sketch, the balance shifts. Harvey Korman finally gets the upper hand — and Tim Conway is the one left fighting to keep it together. The sketch widely tied to that “revenge” framing is a Jaws parody in which Conway plays a nervous tenant and Korman appears as the shark hunter brought in to solve the problem.
What makes the bit so satisfying is its reversal of a classic television rhythm. Usually, Korman was the elegant victim of Conway’s slow-burn chaos, the consummate professional trying and failing to survive another comic ambush. Here, though, Korman’s performance is so committed and so perfectly pitched that Conway starts to crack instead. One write-up describing the sketch notes that this was a rare case where Korman “turned the tables” on his longtime scene partner, forcing Conway to bite his lip and battle laughter in full view of the audience.
The sketch’s appeal also comes from timing. By the mid-1970s, Jaws had become such a dominant piece of pop culture that parody was almost inevitable, and The Carol Burnett Show was built for exactly that kind of send-up. The series itself was a sketch-comedy landmark, running on CBS from 1967 to 1978 and becoming famous for movie spoofs, recurring characters, and the barely controlled chaos that erupted when its cast could no longer stay in character. Tim Conway joined as a regular in later seasons and became especially beloved for improvised detours that left both castmates and audiences in stitches.
That larger history is what gives a moment like this its extra charge. Fans did not just enjoy seeing Tim Conway laugh. They enjoyed seeing the seemingly impossible happen: Harvey Korman, the man so often broken by Conway, finally delivering a performance sharp enough to return the favor. It feels less like a simple sketch and more like a payoff years in the making, the rare moment when the hunted gets to become the hunter. That interpretation is an inference based on the duo’s long-established comic dynamic and how the sketch is described in later coverage.
And that dynamic was real enough to become part of television legend. The official Carol Burnett Show YouTube archive and compilation videos continue to spotlight Conway and Korman specifically because their chemistry remains one of the program’s most enduring attractions. Even decades later, clips centered on Conway breaking Korman — or, in unusual cases, Korman breaking Conway — still circulate because they capture something modern sketch comedy often struggles to fake: the thrill of performers discovering the joke’s full force in real time.
That is why this so-called revenge moment still lands. It is not just funny because somebody laughs. It is funny because audiences know the history walking into it. They know Conway is usually the one steering the car into the ditch. So when Korman suddenly seizes the wheel and Conway starts visibly losing his own battle for composure, the sketch gains a second layer of pleasure. The joke is on screen, but the deeper joke is between the performers themselves. This paragraph is analysis based on the duo’s recurring on-screen pattern documented in official compilations and show histories.
In the end, that may be the secret to why Tim Conway and Harvey Korman still feel timeless. They were not merely telling jokes. They were playing a long comic game with each other, one built on trust, sabotage, rhythm, and the audience’s delight in watching control slip away. Most of the time, Conway won that game. Every now and then, though, Harvey Korman got his revenge — and it was just as glorious.
